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Britney has delivered the best album of her career, raising the bar for modern pop music with an incendiary mix of Timbaland's 'Shock Value' and her own back catalogue.
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Poetry it's not. Still, there is something delightfully escapist about Blackout, a perfectly serviceable dance album abundant in the kind of bouncy electro elements that buttressed her hottest hits.
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Every song counts as markedly progressive and strange, from 'Get Naked (I Got A Plan)' (which sounds like intergalactic R&B filtered through The Cure's "Pornography") to 'Freakshow,' which gets by on little more than serpentine snaps, wub-wub bass, and Britney sounding synthetic and irresistibly at home.
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It's a bold, exciting album.
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Overall the album is consistently strong and evenly balanced between sexy club tracks and sexy pop tracks.
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The production is glossy and futuristic to a nearly avant-garde point, yet every song is a hit.
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Blackout is state-of-the-art dance-pop, a testament to skills of the producers and perhaps even Britney being somehow cognizant enough to realize she should hire the best, even if she's not at her best.
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She's gonna crank the best pop booty jams until a social worker cuts off her supply of hits.
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Spears’s fifth studio album is her most consistent, a seamlessly entertaining collection of bright, brash electropop.
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For all the state-of-the-art urban production, there’s something distinctly unsavoury about Blackout. And yet, the truly bizarre thing is, the music is top notch.
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Blackout may be more a tribute to the skills of the A-list producers who guided her through the disc than to any of her own talents.
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For every hot, of-the-moment track, though, there's something like the nonsensical 'Hot As Ice,' which was co-penned by the thoroughly talentless T-Pain and might have worked two albums ago but just sounds retrograde here.
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Blackout is business as usual. Courting publicity more shamelessly than that infamous kiss with Madonna, Britney writhes, moans and generally gives good pillow talk for the duration of an album where crunk, glitches, squeaks and clubbed-up beats dominate.
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At times the levels of raciness reach Spinal Tap levels of hilarity, as on 'Ooh Ooh Baby's' slinky Glitter Band stomp.
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It's defiant like a bad drunk, uncomfortably oversexed and more at home in a seedy after-hours club than a celebrity ultra-lounge.
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The biggest failure of these songs, and the most confusing thing about this album, are the melodies.
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Right down to its utterly garish cover, Blackout is utterly disposable and ultimately forgettable.
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Blackout is her fifth and most hilarious record, thanks largely to the contrast between the often-brilliant musical production and Spears' steadfast insistence on taking herself seriously and expecting you will, too on songs called 'Get Naked (I Got a Plan),' 'Freakshow' and 'Why Should I Be Sad?'
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The electronic beats and bass lines are as thick as Ms. Spears’s voice is thin, and as the album title suggests, the general mood is bracingly unapologetic.
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From 'Gimme More's' heavily treated vocals that sound like a sex addict's cry for help to the electro throb of 'Piece Of Me', where fembot Brit tackles the paps with laser eyes, it could really do with a few more human touches.
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Q Magazine'Piece of Me' is a blast at the paparazzi, but her principle target is, inevitably, ex-hubby Kevin Federline. Not all pop stars give up their secrets so readily. [Jan 2008, p.112]
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UncutSighing, panting and smouldering her way throufgh a dozen digitized come-ons, she maintains the fiction of a robo-pop nymphomaniac while all around her, Rome burns. [Jan 2008, p.102]
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This album will sway neither the faithful nor the unbelievers from their positions along the borders of her stalled momentum.
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It wants to be danceable, sexy, and a defiant response to the media shitstorm. It's not even that danceable.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 835 out of 974
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Mixed: 31 out of 974
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Negative: 108 out of 974
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MarinaS.Dec 4, 2009The best her album ever!!
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Sep 10, 2011
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Jan 28, 2016